Stephen Curry's First Date

NBA MVP Steph Curry Dishes On His First Date

Stephen Curry has been in the center of a debate about who is the greatest shooter to have ever lived. There’s evidence in the 40 points he dropped on New Orleans on the opening night of the NBA season. He won the NBA MVP last season and then he led the Golden State Warriors to their first world championship in 40 years. Now, he literally had an entire category devoted to him on Jeopardy.

Here’s answer that wasn’t in the “Steph Curry Dishes” category on Jeopardy: “They drank chai tea lattes and took pictures with Marilyn Monroe on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“We went to Hollywood Boulevard in LA,” Curry told me while we sat outside a golf course in San Francisco where he critiqued some hapless writers’ golf signs during an event sponsored by Degree. “She was living there at the time and I was visiting. She picked me up in her Astro Van. We drove around Hollywood Blvd and took a picture with the Marilyn Monroe statue that was on the Walk of Fame, had some chai tea lattes and did some sight seeing and it went from there.”

Talk about romance. If you’ve ever spent any time around Curry, the one thing you’ll quickly learn is that he’s just a regular guy — a regular guy who just happens to be one of the best basketball players in the whole wide world. He’s actually a pretty decent golfer too.

Since he had won his first MVP and first world title last season, I wanted to know a few of Curry’s other firsts.

First thing he did when he got home after winning the NBA championship: “I went to my putting green. I have a little three-hole putting green in my back yard. I went into the backyard, put some music on and had a beer. I just puttered around for about 30 minutes in the sun and I got to just decompress a little bit. Everything was so crazy. That was sort of my official start to the off-season.”

First game-winning shot: “I was a sophomore playing on varsity (at Charlotte Christian High School). The play wasn’t even drawn up for me. One of my teammates was coming down and he did a move and kind of lost it off his foot and it landed right into my hands. I hit the shot and was running down the court going crazy. It was one the road too so we got to silence the crowd.”

This season represents an interesting time for son of another great shooter, Dell Curry. He’s defending his MVP and again leading the now defending champs and he claims, as he told USA Today, “I’m going to be smarter (this season). That’s the key for me, is to continue to try to make the best decisions with the ball as a point guard, get my teammates involved, feeling the flow of the game and just watching film and learning from last season.”

Curry’s humility is amazing and he always says he’s looking to learn. The champ even learned from the Commander-in-Chief over the summer when he played golf with President Barack Obama.

Curry welcomed his second daughter into the world just a month after winning his championship ring. His 3 year-old daughter, Riley, has already made herself famous. The POTUS, who has two daughters, reportedly talked a fair amount of trash during their game but also imparted some knowledge about fatherhood on Curry.

“He gave me a lot of advice, especially for their teenager years,” Curry said. “That’s where he’s at right now. He just said you’ve got to be patient because eventually – you’re always going to be Dad – but they’re going to be more independent. They’re going to start to keep you at bay. It’s more like ‘I love you Dad’ and they go about their business. But I’m still in my first three years of fatherhood so I’m still a long way away from that.”

Curry talks about improving as a dad the same as he talks about basketball, often drawing on experiences he learned from his father. But on the basketball floor, Steph is by far the superior member of the Curry clan (his younger brother Seth signed a two-year deal with the Sacramento Kings over the summer).

In the 2014-15 seasons Steph pushed the Warriors into elite company with a franchise-record 67 wins. How hard was he to guard exactly? New Orleans Pelicans star Anthony Davis described it best.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Davis once said. “You try to pressure him and run him off the line and he hits incredible shots in the lane. You back off so he won’t sdrive, e’s going to hit a three. So you’ve got to pick your poison.”